Lithuanian fixed and mobile operator Telia Lietuva has installed 4.5G LTE-Advanced Pro (LTE-A Pro) base stations in five major cities across the country, allowing customers to access mobile data rates of up to 500Mbps. The Swedish-owned company took a major step towards 5G by implementing Huawei’s LTE-A Pro technology in Vilnius in February 2016, notes TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, and now the high speed service is also available in Kaunas, Klaipeda, Siauliai and Panevezys. The higher data rates are achieved by combining three or four frequency bands, multi-input, multiple-output (4×4 MIMO) and 256 QAM.
Commenting on the development, Telia Lietuva’s CTO Andrius Semeskevicius said: ‘Already today in five major cities of Lithuania even currently available modern phones and modems support double data transmission speeds, and the network capacity increases accordingly. Meanwhile, the total data flow of one 4.5G base station may amount to 1.5Gbps.’